1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to voicemail and more specifically to automatically transcribing voicemails according to priority.
2. Introduction
Telecommunications companies often provide voicemail services for customers. A typical voicemail service allows callers to record voice messages for later playback by the telephone customer. One specialized feature of voicemail service is transcribing voicemails so that telephone customers can understand messages more clearly, read messages faster, and even copy and paste information from the message. However, transcribing each stored voicemail is an enormous computational task even for high powered mainframes or clusters of computers because of the crushingly high volume of voicemails recorded every day. For example, if a telecommunications company has 200,000 customers with voicemail boxes, and only 25% of those receive an average of 2 voicemails per day that are an average of 45 seconds long, the voicemail system receives roughly 1250 hours' (just over 52 days') worth of voicemail per day. Thus, for this very modest scenario, a transcription computing device would need to transcribe emails roughly 52 times faster than real time in order to keep up with received voicemails. Installing, configuring, maintaining, and powering computer systems sufficiently powerful to transcribe and store all received voicemails in advance is expensive and time consuming.
In addition, transcription is not needed in every case. Only a subset of telephone customers request transcriptions. The remaining unrequested transcriptions are essentially wasted and provide little or no benefit for telephone customers at a great burden to the telecommunications company.
One approach in the art to solve these problems is to transcribe voicemails on demand. On-demand transcriptions solve the problem of wasted computational effort performing unnecessary transcriptions, but they have an additional problem of being slow. On-demand transcriptions can perform somewhat faster with less computation, but they trade speed for reduced accuracy. Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an improved way to transcribe voicemails.